BBC News reports on the new assault on the rights of French Muslim women following the recent court ruling that the “Baby Loup” creche discriminated against nursery assistant Fatima Afif when they sacked her for refusing to remove her headscarf.
See also “Hijab ruling exposes Islamophobia in French politics—on right and left”, Socialist Worker, 2 April 2013
Because of her choice to wear a headscarf, Samia Kaddour, a Muslim, has all but abandoned trying to land a government job in France. Soon, some private sector jobs could be off limits, too.
French President Francois Hollande says he wants a new law that could extend restrictions on the wearing of prominent religious symbols in state jobs into the private sector. His new tack comes after a top French court ruled in March that a day care operator that gets some state funding unfairly fired a woman in a headscarf, sparking a political backlash.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France is promoting a petition which condemns the hijacking of the principle of secularism in order to demonise the Muslim community and calls for a parliamentary commission to investigate the rise of Islamophobia in France. “There is no real secularism without freedom”, the petition states. It was published with an initial 40 prominent signatories in Le Monde last week under the headline “Do not stigmatise Muslims!”
Until 9/11, Islam didn’t figure in the New Atheists’ attacks in a prominent way. As a phenomenon with its roots in Europe, atheism has traditionally been the archenemy of Christianity, though Jews and Judaism have also slipped into the mix. But emboldened by their newfound fervor in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the New Atheists joined a growing chorus of Muslim-haters, mixing their abhorrence of religion in general with a specific distaste for Islam (In 2009, Hitchens published a book called “God Is Not Great,” a direct smack at Muslims who commonly recite the Arabic refrain Allah Akbar, meaning “God is great”). Conversations about the practical impossibility of God’s existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling. The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.
Nathan Lean, author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, skewers Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
French Muslim leaders opened on Friday, March 29, the Bourget’s 30th annual gathering in a climate of anxiety resulting from the recent controversy about hijab ruling.
“There is a real sense of unease among us,” Ahmed Jaballah, the president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), told Agence France Presse (AFP). “The latest statements on secularism show that there is a drift away,” he added.
Ahmed was referring to the recent controversy which followed a ruling by France’s top court that the dismissal of a Muslim woman from a private nursery school for refusing to remove her hijab amounted to “religious discrimination”.
In an unusual move, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls criticized the ruling against the nursery school as putting “secularism into question”.
Backlash is growing in France against a court ruling in favor of a Muslim employee of a private nursery school who was fired after she refused to take her headscarf off. A new poll has found that four-fifths of people in France would back a proposal to ban Muslim headscarves and other visible signs of religion in private companies.
France’s Interior Minister, who is in charge of religions as well as being the top security official, came out against the ruling last week.
In the poll released Monday, 85 percent of respondents opposed the decision, and more than 80 percent said they back a ban in private workplaces and schools. France already bans headscarves and other “ostentatious” signs of religion in public buildings and has outlawed face-covering veils in all.
Associated Press, 25 March 2013
Update: See also ANSAmed, which reports: “Socialists, intellectuals, politicians and humanitarian NGOs signed an online petition launched by Marianne weekly, calling on the government to enact a new, tougher law in defense of secularism, one that will explain with ‘pedagogy and clarity’ where and when the principle of secularism is to be applied. Prominent signatories include philosophers Elisabeth Badinter, Alain Finkielkraut and Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Socialist Party secretary Harlem Desir, and several former ministers.”
A former scout hut which was the focus of protests over plans to turn it into an Islamic centre is to reopen.
Last year the As-Salaam Trust said it wanted to take over the building in Thurnby Lodge, Leicester, after using it for prayer meetings for some months.
A residents group organised a series of protests and a petition, calling for it to be used for the wider community.
But the residents group has been given a rent-free lease of the hut and the As-Salaam Trust will use a nearby site.
Several protests, some attracting hundreds of people and requiring a significant police presence, were held over the issue.
The residents have refitted the building with donated goods since January, when the two-and-a-half-year rent-free lease was agreed.
Originally called the Forgotten Estates, the group is now known as the 55th Community Association, named after the old scout group.
When it comes to the ideology of Islamophobia, fascists invent nothing new – they just take their inspiration from the mainstream media. I doubt most of them had even heard of sharia law or halal slaughter until the right-wing press decided to create moral panics over these issues. In embracing received anti-Muslim prejudice, the one contribution the racist far right does make is to give it an additional thuggish twist.
So, with the likes of the Daily Mail having helped to stir up controversy over so-called “gender segregation” at iERA’s recent public meeting at University College London, it was only a matter of time before far-right racists adopted this as their cause.
A French creche assistant who was famously fired for refusing to remove her Islamic head-scarf had her dismissal annulled by France’s highest appeals court on Tuesday. The court judged the sacking was “religious discrimination”.
Fatima Afif, a nursery assistant sacked in 2008 by the ‘Baby Loup’ creche for refusing to remove her Muslim headscarf at work, won an appeal against her dismissal on Tuesday.
In delivering their verdict judges at Paris’s ‘Cour de cassation’ – France’s highest appeals court – said her firing “constituted discrimination based on religious convictions and must be declared invalid.”
The Islamic Education & Research Academy has issued a statement in response to the controversy over the “Islam or atheism” debate at University College London last Saturday.